After an extensive restoration of LatchKey Gallery's main room, we're thrilled to announce the reopening of Protected Spaces. This two-person exhibition will highlight works by Dominique Duroseau and Kevin Claiborne.

Working across a diverse range of mediums, Protected Spaces is an existential inquiry into Duroseau and Claiborne’s learned perceptions of intimacy. Through their lived experiences both artists interrogate and deconstruct family histories, as well as romantic and platonic relationships to re-understand intimacy as a complex interplay of vulnerability, desire, yearning, and eroticism.

Kevin Claiborne is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist whose work examines intersections of identity, social environment, & mental health within the Black American experience. Queen, an image sourced from his family’s archive depicts his mom on a reflective surface, saturated by blue pigment. The material choice obscures while simultaneously revealing an abstracted portal into the complex relationship between memory and vulnerability. Threading the dichotomy of figuration and abstraction, Claiborne symbolically questions the dependent narrative of the figure to rethink accepted definitions of a shared history.

Dominique Duroseau's interdisciplinary practice explores themes of racism, socio-cultural issues, and existential dehumanization. Her works function as a microcosmos of different (black) cultures, people, experiences, sentiments, and points in time. The large-scale sculptural wall piece, Qt.Eroticism: hearth & home. heart & home. plus-sized linked harness needed hugs. is a continuation of her Black-on- Black-with-Black, and Black on Black Eroticism Series — both of which incorporates a rich tapestry of texts, textures, materials, and surfaces that intertwine and entangle abstracting the complexities of identity and being. Colliding delicately but deliberately through stitches and pins, each surface interlocks to expose a vulnerability that is only revealed by thoughtful investigation. These varying forms tell the story of black corporeality as a sensual guide of all kinds of raw beauty and desires.

The shared aesthetics of language as a visual medium, permeate throughout the gallery walls. Poetic and playful - critical and resilient these words provoke thoughtful reflection to communicate needs as a strength. What indelibly ties these artists together is the visually poetic practice used through material; surface and texture where meaning is grounded both inside and outside the art extending beyond form into metaphor creating a stillness within the gallery to encourage contemplation and reflection.

About the artists

Dominique Duroseau is a Newark-based artist born in Chicago and raised in Haiti. Her interdisciplinary practice explores themes of racism, socio-cultural issues, and existential dehumanization. Her exhibitions, performances, and screenings include The Kitchen, The Brooklyn Museum and the New Museum (BWA for BLM), El Museo del Barrio, A.I.R. Gallery, BronxArtSpace, Rush Arts Gallery, and Smack Mellon in New York City; The Newark Museum, Index Arts, Project for Empty Space, and Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ.

Her recent exhibitions and talks include: a solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, a panelist at Black Portraiture(s) at Harvard and lecturer at Vassar.

She was a fellow at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, and received artist residencies from Gallery Aferro, Index Art Center, the Wassaic Project, and Shine Portrait Studio; and recently awarded a residency at MassMOCA, NARS Foundation and Artists Alliance Inc. Duroseau holds a Bachelor of Architecture and a Master of Arts in Fine Arts from Yale University.

Kevin Claiborne (b. 1989) is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist whose work examines intersections of identity, social environment, & mental health within the Black American experience. Moving between collage, silkscreen, photography, painting, and sculpture, while frequently using language as material, Claiborne is interested in finding new ways to look at history and its connection to the present.

Claiborne holds a B.S. in Mathematics from the historically Black college North Carolina Central University (2012), an M.S. in Higher Education from Syracuse University (2016), and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University (2021).